Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Getting paid on time

Military auditors still have "major" unresolved issues with Halliburton, the Pentagon said on Tuesday, a day after Democratic congressmen released an audit questioning $108 million in costs by the contractor.

A Pentagon spokeswoman said the audit, which found $108 million in questionable fuel delivery costs in Iraq by Halliburton unit Kellogg Brown and Root, was conducted to determine whether "fair and reasonable" prices were charged.

"The majority of costs questioned in this audit report are because DCAA (Defense Contract Audit Agency) auditors believe that KBR paid an unreasonable price for the fuel," the spokeswoman said.

Today, with more than 183,000 reservists mobilized for active duty, payroll workers must manually calculate their pays each month and use painstaking work-arounds to replicate active-duty pays. In other cases, data must be transferred manually from reserve to active-duty systems. And even the active-duty system must be manually recomputed to take into account recently approved pays that were never envisioned three and four decades ago.

Moreover, all this takes place using the obsolete COBOL programming code first developed by Adm. Grace Hopper in the 1950s, which predates the era of personal computers.

The Navy Times article claims that 95% of mobilized reservists are "plagued by payroll mistakes". I'm sure Halliburton wouldn't mind refunding that $100 million in fuel overcharges to help make sure that American reservists can enjoy a system that pays them the right amount at the right time.